John Lott is the Republican go-to guy for false statistics and cooked books. Lott cooked the books on his more-guns-less-crime study, then lied about it; he made up a sock puppet named Mary Rosh to sing his praises. Most people who did these things would be pariahs in the academic community, but Lott isn’t an academic — he’s a conservative. And as he knows how to use nifty math-laden language to make his points appear to be more than a blogger rant, he’s useful to the right.
Today’s bit of Lott inanity comes from Fox News, in which Lott and someone else with the same last name (son? Brother? Invisible friend?) declare that the Canvassing Board is, like, totally biased toward Al Franken and stuff:
Some board decisions on votes are exceedingly difficult to understand, and even watching the television coverage of their decisions this last week provided little additional insight. Here is an example where the Minnesota Canvassing Board claims the vote is clearly for Franken. Voters are supposed to fill in the small oval next to a candidate’s name to vote for that candidate. The board explains its decision as there being “No Dup” (presumably meaning that there was no duplicate ballot), but it is not clear how that would switch what looks like an obvious Coleman vote to a Franken vote.
OMG! He’s right! The vote is obviously for Norm Coleman. What can explain this sinister action?
Knock knock!
Who is it? Why, it’s actually accurate statistics wonk Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com! What’s that, Nate? You say that there’s an innocent explanation for this? I find that hard to believe, but do tell:
The ballot in question, from Minnesota’s 4th Ward, 8th Precinct, was originally cast and counted for Norm Coleman. It was challenged by the Franken campaign, which claimed that it was a duplicate ballot, and designated as the 3rd challenge from that precinct. The challenge was subsequently withdrawn, as the Franken campaign withdraw essentially all of his challenges on supposed duplicate ballots. And appropriately, the Canvassing Board added the vote back into Coleman’s column […]
So where did Lott get the idea that the vote had been counted for Franken? Apparently from the Star Tribune’s website, which had it listed it that way. The Star Tribune, keeping an unofficial tally of more than 6,000 challenged ballots, apparently made a boo-boo.
Ah. So the Canvassing Board counted this obviously for-Coleman ballot as…a ballot for Coleman. But the Strib had a typo. This only prove’s Lott’s larger point, which is…
…What in the world can that be?…
…Um, anyhow. Where were we? I’m sure it was another display of Lott’s dizzying intellect.
The truth is that Lott can cherry-pick data with the best of ‘em, and he does that very well. But the Minnesota recount has been conducted as fairly and openly as possible under the circumstances. Lott wants us to believe that a Canvassing Board with two Pawlenty-appointed judges somehow had it out for Norm Coleman from the start. Sorry, given the choice between John Lott and my own eyes, I’ll trust my own eyes, thank you very much.
If my own eyes agreed with John Lott, I would look at it again closer and try to get someone else to look at it for confirmation.
As I explained in comments in that FiveThirtyEight thread, it was not just a “typo”. The Star Tribune used an unstable data representation, which gets thrown off by ANY change, including at least two that occurred subsequent to all these items being posted! The enormity of what John Lott did is:
(a) For his original Thu.12/28-Fri 12/19 blog piece, he didn’t check the relevant primary source—the SoS’ own publicly-released data.
(b) His original post wrote that several Coleman votes were ruled “clearly for Franken” and some vice-versa. When apprised of the link errors, he silently corrected this to “clearly for no one” or “for no one”, with no clear note of error.
(c) Nevertheless, he kept the words “clearly for Franken” on the ballot example that headlined the Mon 12/22 version for Fox News, whose resolution (for Coleman!) wasn’t yet posted by the SoS as it was a duplicate-ballot issue. I.e. despite KNOWING there were STrib errors, and KNOWING he couldn’t yet check the primary source, he blasted this on Fox News!
(d) He has made no clear retraction.
(e) He made other false statements, such as asserting that the Canvassing Board’s decisions resulted in a net swing of 270 to Franken—the correct swing value appears currently to be 46 – 4 = 42.
(f) The only claim I cannot prove: when I viewed his piece on 12/19, I am quite sure that the STrib links (having been partially fixed, as documented in an undated/untimed update on Lott’s piece) showed different ballot images from the ones Lott had clipped for his entry. I.e. I don’t think he even reviewed the correspondence to the ballot images.
Notice that this is far more extensive than what Nate Silver noted, and that other commenters in those threads recognized me for this and repeated some of my points.
I submitted a MediaMatters.com tip, marked attn. David Brock who happens to have been 2 classes after me at Paramus High School. Based on what I see of Lott’s prior history, it seems redundant to try to hold him accountable, but perhaps something can be done with those who gave him such easy entree’.